Fashion

Looks From The FW16 Shows That You'll Want to Instagram

In case you haven’t read a fashion headline in the past five years, fashion designers are making clothes with millennials in mind. What used to be limited to exclusively fast fashion—clothes bearing kooky words and phrases, appropriated logos, and delivering clothes by the seconds—has now fully seeped into the more serious, high-end fashion world.

This past fashion month—much like the handful of ones that came before it—demonstrated just how much the industry has become tied up with millennial-fluent Internet culture. Images and updates from fashion month, we were all quick to discover, were going to make their way into our feeds whether we liked it or not. Below are but a few examples from the FW16 collections of the different ways designers have attempted to cozy up to millennials and Internet culture.

Swarms of emojis at Chanel

Don’t let Karl Lagerfeld’s age fool you; he might be 82 years old, but he has the sprightly spirit and energy of his 7-year-old godson Hudson Kroenig. Lagerfeld has always delivered a prodigious number of looks for his collections, but only recently has he begun to deliver 80+ looks six times a year.

One particularly millennial friendly motif that pervaded his FW16 collection was the elusive emoji. Karl concocted his very own emoji print, complete with the thumbs up sign and the four leaf clover. Peace sign emojis were diamond encrusted and fashioned into belt buckles, and cat emojis were diamond encrusted as well and fashioned into bracelets and brooches. Most notable, however, was the interspersing of the Chanel logo within the swarms of emojis. It had a hypnotic effect, as if Karl’s intention was to throw so many emojis and Chanel logos at us at once, that we begin to intuitively associate the Chanel logo with our favorite collection of emojis. Long story short, it worked.

An emojional look from Chanel FW16.

Miu Miu’s Insta-Girls

Miuccia Prada has never been one to bend to the needs of millennials and Internet culture. She tends to dole out thoughtful, impeccably crafted, and intellectually stimulating designs that, at least recently, fight back against this vapid, digital time. For Miu Miu’s FW16 collection, Prada took inspiration from the early ‘70s and ‘80s, but it was the cohort of it-tastic models in her show that felt especially suited for Instagram. The lineup included Bella Hadid, Gigi Hadid, Kendall Jenner and—for the clincher—Emily Ratajkowski.

Emily at Miu Miu FW16.

The Bieber tributes of Vetements

Vetements, everyone’s new favorite brand, is at once renegade and nonconformist, while still complying to millennials’ hooded, nostalgic needs. Their FW16 collection was heavy on the slogan-printed garments, and these weren’t your innocent Rolling Stone lyrics either. Among some of the phrases that graced the clothes were “Justin4ever,” “Big Daddy,” and “Sexual Fantasies.” Sartorial trolling at its finest.

Vetements FW16 paid tribute to the Biebs.

Undercover’s chopped up aesthetic

Jun Takahashi’s Undercover is as well crafted as it is subversive. He takes your everyday garment, tears it at the seams, and then pieces it back together to fit his deconstructed, slightly masochistic, sometimes silly aesthetic. For Fall/Winter ’16, he printed Matthie Bourel’s work onto his clothes. And so sweaters featured distorted and warped images of beautiful women, giving them an eerie, Lynchian feel. The images—appropriated and then appropriately slashed and chopped up—looked like something you might find in BessNYC’s portfolio, the Instagram artist known for his chilling collages that the fashion industry has recently taken a liking to.

A creepy look from Undercover’s FW16 collection.

Emoji-shaped fitness trackers at Yazbukey

The Turkish brand’s aesthetic has always been markedly playful, but for Fall/Winter ’16, they moved into unmistakable millennial territory. The design duo collaborated with Intel on an EMOJI collection of wearable technology. The result was 20-something bait that resembled shiny, titillating emoji stickers, but in actuality were just emoji shaped fitness trackers—complete with Bluetooth, memory, and motion detection.